On September 20th, after a three-year delay caused by the pandemic, the seventh Jing'an International Sculpture Project finally opened under the title "Spatial Evolution," to a public that had been waiting for it for a long time. The project, launched in 2010, was the first sustained attempt in China to bring sculpture and public art together in a public park, and this edition marked its fourteenth year.
The show filled the park with thirty-four groups of work — forty-two pieces in all — by twenty-eight artists from around the world. Among them were names with real international standing: Antony Gormley, Katinka Bock, Jean-Marie Appriou, Lawrence Weiner, Elmgreen & Dragset, Nadim Karam. Chinese artists were represented too — Liu Yi, Cai Jian, Zhou Yiran, and the artist known as Naifenzhou — names familiar to anyone who follows the local scene.
More than ten of the works were made specifically for this edition, site-specific pieces commissioned for the park itself. A number of the artists had made repeated trips to Shanghai beforehand, walking the grounds, trying to design something that would sit naturally against the landscape around it — among them Juan Garaizabal, whose towering installation "Eternal Balcony" and earlier piece "Infinite Pagoda" both appear in the park, and Zhou Yiran, whose "Inside Out, Outside In" greets visitors near one of the entrances.
A few days before the opening, while installation crews were still working against the clock, we visited the Jing'an Sculpture Park Art Post to talk with Mao Wencai, who leads the Rougevif team that has organized this exhibition for all fourteen years — about the show everyone had been anticipating, and about the road Chinese public art has traveled to get here. The end of September had turned cooler than usual, and in that crisp early-autumn air we walked into the park, tucked among the old plane trees at the center of the city.
This year's defining change was structural rather than artistic: every gate in the park's perimeter fencing had been taken down, turning the whole space into what amounts to a museum open around the clock. Visitors can now walk in from any of the open paths, day or night. Passing by on the street, you can see straight into the park — nothing blocks the sightline to the sculptures inside. Without that boundary, the art feels closer to both the landscape and the people walking through it.
Coming in through Gate 1 on Shimen Er Road, visitors follow a straight main path and meet Arik Levy's steel sculptures "Rock Growth 320" and "Rock Formation Tower 455 Corten" first. Every branch radiating from the sculptures' centers has its own distinct cross-section, evoking the growth rings of a felled tree — full of a kind of raw vitality.
Each branch carries the record of its own growth, its own evolution, which made the piece a fitting opener for a show titled "Spatial Evolution." "I think in the past few years, it's not just China — all of humanity has needed to evolve, in the sense of how we hold up emotionally against a world that feels uncertain, uncontrollable, moving in ways that don't answer to human will," Mao Wencai told us. "A lot of what's in this show speaks directly to that."
Farther in, a looping spiral bridge, six meters at its highest point, rises from both sides of the path and meets in the middle — this is Katinka Bock's "World Bridge." Between the two halves of the bridge stands a Chinese tallow tree, five or six meters tall; visitors can climb up from either side with a friend and meet under its shade, in a kind of engineered magpie bridge reunion. Every edition of the show includes a few works built for this kind of interaction, and this is one of them. From the ground, the bridge looks simple enough, but walk a full circle underneath it and the piece looks different from every angle.
"The first time I saw it, I ran straight up the steps to try it out," Mao said. "I assumed climbing would be easy, but once I picked up speed I felt completely dizzy — the bridge is angled, it's not flat. That stuck with me, because the idea behind the piece is that it looks like two people just need to take a few steps toward each other to solve things between them. But it's not actually that simple. That stretch of path is harder to walk than it looks."
Past the bridge stands the Shanghai Natural History Museum, where the line to get in has wrapped around four or five times every weekend and school holiday since it opened. On the lawn along the museum's side slope sat a cluster of miniature house models, small and almost too cute, and beside them two enormous octopuses — one blue, one orange — stretched out their tentacles as if waving hello.
"That piece belongs to the natural history museum," Mao said. "The museum is about the animal kingdom, the natural world, the ocean. Visitors can pick up one of the octopus's tentacles and talk to someone standing far away — one person speaks into it, the other listens on the far end. It's another interactive piece."
From a distance, three enormous blocks of "cheese" sat on the roof of the indoor art center — a work by Kwon Osang. Up close, it becomes clear that the cheese is really just a flat plane; the holes cut into its surface aren't only for realism, they also keep the wind from knocking the flat panels over.
No conversation about public art avoids the name Antony Gormley, and his piece "Root" (2017) stood enclosed in an outdoor glass box, its exposed roots echoing the actual tree trunk and roots behind it. Sealed inside glass, close enough to smell the plants around it and yet displayed like something in a museum gallery, the piece sits at once near to and far from its viewers — a small, deliberate contradiction.
The park's art post sits right next to Gormley's piece, so we stopped in for coffee. Inside, half the cafe had been converted into a gallery space, and the first step through the door landed on something sharp but soft at the same time.
"This whole room is Liu Yi's work," Mao explained. "The seating, and what you just stepped on — they're all modeled on hedgehog spines." In the accompanying video piece, titled "I Really Want to Like You," the hedgehog stands in for that impulse: wanting to get close to someone, while the natural instinct of anyone approaching a hedgehog is to pull back. "It's a pretty accurate picture of this generation's fear of intimacy," Mao told us.
Past the glass-enclosed sunroom, we came to Jim Lambie's "Mirror Stair Gaze" — ladders of different lengths in bright colors, paired with mirrors, catching the light differently from every angle as you walk past, so that you keep seeing a different version of yourself. Farther along, Jean-Marie Appriou's silver "Horizons" caught the direct sunlight and seemed to glow; the piece had been shipped straight from Basel and was making its first appearance in Asia.
The park also has a water pavilion — flowing water and sculpture on one side, a winding platform for visitors to walk on the other, the roof above half-open, somewhere between shelter and exposure, carrying a distinctly classical Chinese sensibility. Nearby, Alejandro Vega Beuvrin's "Barricada #9" and Xu Yunqing's "Them" (2023) round out the setting.
Walking the length of the park, we kept noticing how many of the works were bound up with Shanghai's own culture and history — almost all of them made to measure for this exhibition. For his twenty-meter-tall "balcony," built entirely out of line, Juan Garaizabal made several trips to Shanghai, trying to let the piece speak to something particular about the city.
"Juan feels that Shanghainese people have a real emotional attachment to balconies," Mao said, "because housing here used to be so cramped — we have a saying about staging an opera inside a snail shell — and a lot of daily life had to happen out on the balcony. It answered a need people had, psychologically."
Another piece, Leandro Erlich's "The Eyes of Shanghai," made its point more directly: the artist built an airborne window using the shikumen stone-gate doorframes typical of old Shanghai housing, a window that seems to offer a glimpse into the city's layered past — Shanghai's cosmopolitan style tangled together with its traditions, the local dialect running into English.
Brian Tolle's "For the Gentle Wind Does Move Silently, Invisibly" (2023) — a sculpture that looks as though it has been bent by love — takes its title from a line by the poet William Blake, on never trying to speak your love aloud, because love travels like a soft wind, carrying the scent of flowers to you without a sound.
In the sculpture, the "wind" becomes a literal bend in the metal; the "scent of flowers" is handled just as directly — after studying the park's terrain, Tolle planted the piece with flowers and plants native to Shanghai. Elsewhere, Leandro Erlich's "Global City" (2023) mounts the world's most recognizable skylines onto the surface of a giant sphere, a way of suggesting that the world really is one enormous city, its people's fates tied together across regions.
Visitors kept finding buildings they recognized on the sphere — the Oriental Pearl Tower, the Shanghai Tower, landmarks the artist added specifically for this exhibition, giving the piece an unexpected note of familiarity. In the show's extended zone, at the Suhewan Wondertown site along Shanghai's Suzhou Creek, Elmgreen & Dragset's "Zip City" (2019) plays on a similar theme, its skyline echoing Shanghai's own nickname, the "magic city."
In that piece, the skyscrapers are hung upside down, offering a way to see a familiar city from an unfamiliar angle — a shift in physical space that produces a shift in how you feel about it. "When we look up at skyscrapers now — the three towers in Lujiazui, say — we're always craning our necks, and it creates distance," Mao said. "But when the artist flips the skyline over, we're suddenly looking down on it instead of up. Without anyone planning it that way, the sense of being dwarfed by these towers just dissolves."
This year's extended zone held more surprises than any previous edition. Stretching more than forty kilometers out from the main site, the artworks were scattered across the city, woven into the daily life of the neighborhoods around them — places visitors could walk to, bike to, or take a bus to see. At Shixi High School, the artist Zhang Zhaoying built a neon-lit "24-Hour Museum," placing figures and famous paintings from art history on light-box panels around the school so students could take in art history at any hour. Elsewhere, the Lebanese artist Nadim Karam — a figure of real national standing in his own country — installed pieces at both the century-old Zhang Garden and at a newer green space, a deliberate pairing of old and new.
For visitors who wanted more interaction, there was the late Lawrence Weiner's text-based public artwork, laid out at Suhewan Wondertown like a giant game of hopscotch — a signature format the artist had installed on buildings, streets, and public spaces around the world, arriving in Shanghai for the first time.
At the Zhenning Road wet market, the artist Naifenzhou created a work called "Off to Market!" — an unlikely pairing of contemporary art with the noise and clutter of a produce market. "Naifenzhou's bedsheet paintings hang on the first and second floors of the market," Mao explained. "When residents buy vegetables, vendors bag them in plastic printed with the artist's own graffiti designs, and matching printed cloths are handed out to vendors to cover their stalls once they close up for the day."
By now, the Jing'an International Sculpture Project has grown into something well beyond the word "sculpture" — a project that has genuinely woven public art into the fabric of the city. "I think good public art carries real symbolic weight for a city — it's a marker of how developed a civilization is," Mao said. "New York is a young city, so the art outside every building tends to be new. Europe has both new and old, and that layering is itself a visible record of urban history."
"Fourteen years ago, when we first got involved with public art, the term didn't really exist yet here. Anything installed in the city was just called 'urban sculpture,' and the office that managed it was called the 'Urban Sculpture Office,'" Mao said. "It probably sounds almost quaint now, but that's genuinely what people called it back then. That office doesn't even exist anymore — it's been renamed the Department of Public Art. We've lived through the whole arc of that shift, alongside the growth of Chinese cities themselves."
She told us that over the years, she has watched the audience's taste visibly evolve — from the first edition, when most visitors could only really engage with representational sculpture, to today, when abstraction, video art, installation, and other media all find an audience willing to meet them halfway. "Public art has to be public first — it has to speak to ordinary people, not just to the artist working alone in a studio or to whatever hangs on a museum's white walls. There's a saying: the people's city is built by the people, and the people's park belongs to the people. What matters most is whether people understand it, want to talk about it, and actually like it," Mao said, laughing.
Mao told us that over more than a decade, the exhibition has built up a loyal following. Once, walking in through the park gates during installation, she was stopped by an elderly Shanghainese woman who greeted her happily in the local dialect: "Little sister, little sister — is the show starting again? So pretty, so good to look at!"
"That moment made me genuinely happy," Mao said. "Hearing a visitor say the show looks good, hearing that they're already looking forward to the next one — it made all these years of work feel worth it. It felt like we'd actually accomplished something."
Contributing writer: Huang Xirui. Editor: Deng Kaili. Images courtesy of Rougevif Public Art.